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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Female ejaculation is a feminist issue...

50 replies

SolidGoldBrass · 18/01/2015 20:08

Especially in the light of the porn laws. Anway, this is a good article on the topic, what does everyone else think?

OP posts:
YonicSleighdriver · 18/01/2015 21:28

Aren't they two separate issues though? 1 - is it real (yes)? 2 - in porn, is it largely faked in some way, whether via urine or something else, old fashioned hymen faking bag springs to mind (probably a fair bit)

EBearhug · 18/01/2015 21:31

I think it's raising a valid point about women knowing their own bodies.

mrscumberbatch · 18/01/2015 21:34

It is totally ridiculous.

Let jizz be jizz

Amethyst24 · 18/01/2015 22:36

Agree Yonic - women should be able to define their own sexual experiences as they choose, but to say depictions of FE in porn, in which the ejaculate almost certainly is urine, aren't allowed because urination isn't allowed, is not unreasonable IMO.

This is interesting also. blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/2015/01/12/proof-female-ejaculation-just-pee/#.VLw09MZEzS8

RufusTheReindeer · 19/01/2015 08:17

That's the bit I don't get with the porn thing

Is it because people don't believe FE exists and /or believe it's wee that it's not allowed?

Because if I was in to people weeing all over the show I wouldn't pick up a DVD saying scenes of FE as that's not giving me the same message

If I was convinced that FE was wee I might but surely the context would be different

RufusTheReindeer · 19/01/2015 15:30

Please don't let me have killed a thread with a post discussing weeing in porn movies!!!

I'm going to have to name change, post on the thread and pretend it wasn't me Hmm

Amethyst24 · 19/01/2015 16:09

Grin Rufus I wasn't privy to the discussions of the Porn Board but it makes sense that the logic would be, "Even if female ejaculate, when spontaneously produced when a woman has an orgasm, isn't wee (although none of the studies that have been done support that view), when a woman is faking orgasm and ejaculation for a camera, what she's producing will certainly be wee. And wee isn't allowed."

I don't think it's about curtailing the depiction of female sexual pleasure.

SolidGoldBrass · 19/01/2015 16:18

Hang on, why so sure that a female ejaculatory orgasm in porn is always faked? It probably is sometimes, but not always - women don't have to be 'in love' to orgasm, it is a physical response as well as a psychological one.

OP posts:
Amethyst24 · 19/01/2015 16:29

SGB, I certainly didn't suggest they had to be in love! But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the vast majority of female orgasms shown in porn - ejaculatory or not - are faked.

mrscumberbatch · 19/01/2015 17:28

But hang on, female ejaculate is 90% prostate fluid and 10% wee.
Unavoidably so.

It's not something you have control over.

Amethyst24 · 19/01/2015 17:52

Not necessarily, mrscumberbatch

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-behind-female-ejaculation-9987298.html

That article states that "It seems that larger volume fluid emissions, or squirting, are for the most part urine. However, there does appear to be evidence that a smaller volume of fluid is actually female prostate secretion due to mechanical stimulation of the G-spot."

And I'd assert that in porn, a. you're going to want there to be a large amount to get the maximum visual effect, and b. because female ejaculation doesn't happen every time a women has an orgasm, and women act orgasms in porn, they're likely to be weeing rather than ejaculating anyway.

RufusTheReindeer · 19/01/2015 18:29

So it was a study based on 7 women?

Amethyst24 · 19/01/2015 18:55

Presumably women aren't exactly lining up round the block to take part in such studies Confused

RufusTheReindeer · 19/01/2015 19:34

Don't think I'd be keen Smile

mrscumberbatch · 19/01/2015 22:51

paper [[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25545022/]]

I got it wrong way round. Serves me right for thinking about squirting at work...

So this is what happens when women ejaculate... Who cares what's in it? Does it really matter?

DadWasHere · 20/01/2015 05:55

SGB, in regard commercial porn, I think the people with an appetite for it are as interested/invested in the woman actually enjoying herself as most people are in believing Jason Bourne is an actual real spy.

Extract:
Since pornography is a visual medium and female ejaculation is the only visual evidence of female orgasm, this ban is tantamount to a wholesale censorship of female sexual pleasure in explicit media.

Argh! Complaining about a ban on a specific depiction of the female orgasm while commercial porn is already chock full of women howling different versions of 'IM CUMMMMING!' as they make an 'O' face is like complaining about a fly buzzing around your head while being stung to death by hornets. If people want to be outraged at the censorship of depictions of female sexual pleasure in commercial porn they should be outraged that the most successful method of getting a woman to orgasm, cunnilingus, is so utterly non-existent in commercial porn its more mythological than a unicorn.

YonicScrewdriver · 20/01/2015 07:25

"Like" on DWH's post.

tina363 · 22/01/2015 14:44

Obviously me as a woman have done this ejaculate thing with my fiance as far as we thought this was me at the height of orgasm and he felt proud to help me reach that point. Then he read and article about it which said it was wee Confused so now when i get to that point i hold back because neither of us are into seeing on each other Smile so what is it? Wee? Or actually just the way us women ejaculate?

tina363 · 22/01/2015 14:48

*weeing

LurcioAgain · 22/01/2015 15:12

I'm a bit meh about the whole issue. As I understand it, some women report experiencing this but they're in the minority (and it is incredibly difficult to do a controlled scientific experiment which would tell you unequivocally whether it was ejaculate or wee). But the thing I find interesting is the emphasis within certain circles of trying to persuade women that their orgasms are not good enough the way they are. Needclitoral ststimulation? Here's some handy techniques (because hey what matters is the man being able to have sex by just poking his dick in you) - see for eg Pamela Stevenson' recent Graun column. Not ejaculating? That's cos you're uptight and not letting go (not because hey itmight aactually be some weird piece of propaganda on the part of the porn industry to insist that only men's orgasms are proper orgasms and therefore unless they can be made to look like male orgasms they aren't proper ones).

DWH seems to have nailed it. And to the previous poster - if I understand you right, you're one of the minority of women who does orgasm this way but now you're worried you're "not doing it right" that it's just wee. Well how about asking yourself an entirely different question: do I enjoy it? If yes, carry on. Among the many things I hate about visual porn it's this performative emphasis - the idea that everyone then starts to think of their sex life as being watched by an imagonary panel of judges giving marks for technical merit and artistic impression. The only thing that matters is that both of you enjoy it - whether it's the missionary position in the dark or swinging from the lightshade shoving courgettes up each other's orifices.

EBearhug · 22/01/2015 18:37

I'm not swinging from the lampshade. I had to change the lightbulb this morning, and that was more than enough hassle.

SolidGoldBrass · 22/01/2015 18:42

I have seen quite a lot of cunnilingus in porn (used to review porn DVDs for magazines) so it simply isn't true to say that it doesn't happen.
As to the point about 'visible evidence' of orgasm, it's not entirely unheard of for the male ejaculation to be faked, now you mention it - but on the whole, ejaculation, whoever's doing the spurting, is more complicated to fake than pulling a face and going 'Ohhhhhh!'

Generally, even among people who accept the idea that female ejaculation exists, there is an acceptance that not every female (cis-female, to be absolutely clear and avoid any sidetracking) does ejaculate. I am inclined to think it might be one of those genetic things, like rolling your tongue a certain way. But one of the reasons I keep on defending porn - as in the concept that there is nothing wrong with peforming sex acts for an audience nor with wanting to watch them - is that good porn is one way to demonstrate that sexual behaviour is diverse and so are human beings.
A lot of anti-porn activism is very proscriptive about what you can do sexually as well as what you can watch.

OP posts:
RufusTheReindeer · 22/01/2015 19:14

tina

IME it doesn't look like wee, smell like wee or feel like wee

So I'm going with it's not wee and I'll hide any articles that DH might read telling him it's wee Smile

LurcioAgain · 22/01/2015 20:08

SGB - "Generally, even among people who accept the idea that female ejaculation exists, there is an acceptance that not every female (cis-female, to be absolutely clear and avoid any sidetracking) does ejaculate." Interestingly, in the BTL comments on the Stephenson piece I mentioned (I know, I know, never read below the line), one of the commentors made some snide remark about "there are women in their 40s so sexually repressed they've never squirted." (I just thought "give your right wrist a break, mate"). So there are people out there using it as yet another stick to beat women with.

I know you and I have different views about filmed porn, but as I've also mentioned before (I know I'm not a proper published author like you) I read and write amateur erotica in the form of fanfic. And I think I take the position LRD did when she likened porn to conflict diamonds - I can absolutely see the appeal of decent, well made porn, but in the absence of any crystal ball which will tell me which stuff is consensually made and which stuff is filmed evidence of sexual violence, I choose not to watch it.

But, setting that argument aside, I'm not sure it's as straightforward as "at least porn shows you sexual behaviour is diverse." I'm sure it can do, and can be accepting of difference. But I think it can also come across as proscriptive - in fact I suspect, from what I hear of what women have to put up with in terms of the sexual scenarios men seem to want them to act out in the early stages of dating these days, that the majority of it is proscriptive, unimaginative, and from a female perspective deeply unerotic.

By the same token, written erotica is a mixed bag. On the plus side, I remember early on in reading fanfic, I came across a sex scene where the man manually stimulated the woman's clitoris during PIV - and I did this kind of "happy dance" of "at last, sex the way it is in the real world" - it's one of the reasons I read fanfic, because it's largely by and for a female audience who want to talk about how things are rather than how we're told they ought to be - but again, just as with filmed porn, it's not that straightforward. There is an enormous, Twilight/50-shades-ish fetishisation of abusive relationships (I'm not talking about genuine BDSM here, I'm talking about a kind of sexual tourism which pretends to be BDSM but in fact is about the eroticisation of male violence).

And I think we need to be able to discuss these things without having accusations of "puritanism" and "prudery" thrown around. There's a slogan in fanfic "My kink is not your kink and that's okay" - which I personally think is ridiculous. We should be able to have critical feminist discussions of why, for instance, so many women write, read and favourably review rape fantasies, and whether this is just curiosity and purely part of their private fantasy lives and thus okay, or whether it's symptomatic of something deeply troubling about societal attitudes to sex, women's sexuality in particular and indicative of internalised misogyny.

Sorry, very wordy essay, but I do want to try to have some sort of discussion that goes beyond the "you're an apologist/you're a prude" dichotomy which hampers so much discussion (while arguing that there are some non-negotiables - sexual violence against women is bad, and there's no possible argument which could turn that round into a good thing).

gatewalker · 22/01/2015 20:28

SGB - I don't believe FE is genetic. It has a lot to do with level of arousal and the kind of stimulation that happens - and there generally has to be a lot of specific stimulation. A not-widely-known finding is that it takes about 45 minutes for a woman to be completely aroused. Which, sadly, means that many, if not most, women are not fully aroused during intercourse, and especially during penetration.

Some women squirt quickly. Most don't. Most women need consistent, focussed arousal. I'd say that is sorely lacking in the general fucking repertoire that I've had the (mis)fortune to witness - both personally, professionally, and pornographically.

So, yes. Female ejaculation to me is a feminist issue.